


per praecipitium

by plingo_kat



Category: The Dresden Files (TV)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:08:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28132935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plingo_kat/pseuds/plingo_kat
Summary: Harry slept with Bob's skull sometimes. It wasn't weird.
Relationships: Hrothbert of Bainbridge/Harry Dresden
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	per praecipitium

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StopTalkingAtMe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/gifts).



> Ok, not going to lie, I originally was going to gift a horror-casefic where Bob and Harry were trapped in the DuMorne mansion with a ~mysterious enemy~ out to get them, but... I ran into a wall when I was writing it. So instead have mutual pining due to Bob being a ghost! I hope it still fulfils your wishes!

It wasn’t... it wasn’t weird.

That’s what Harry told himself, anyway, the first time he took Bob’s skull to bed with him after he left Justin DuMorne’s house. (Forever, he thought at the time, although that assumption unfortunately turned out to be false.) When he was a child Bob had seemed an austere and stern taskmaster, one that slowly became a friend. In his preteens Bob would occasionally guard against nightmares, fingers hovering a hair's breadth above his skin as he pretended to stroke Harry’s brow until Harry closed his eyes and nestled into the pillows. After an extremely bad week Harry had defiantly carried Bob’s skull under the blankets and curled around it, knees pulled up to his chin and arms slung over his calves, and shut his eyes tight until Bob sighed and hummed him to sleep.

He grew out of it when he got older -- when he discovered puberty, to be honest, and became mortified at the thought of Bob’s skull within touching distance of his boner. By then he was already hopelessly in love with the ghost and had a multitude of plans to free him from his curse. Bob had to know, Harry realized in hindsight, but at the time he thought he’d hid his feelings well. Even with Bob’s skillful discouragement.

The dry studies, the dirty drudgery of potions, the haughty and arrogant expectation of perfection; it all might have worked to kill Harry’s crush if he weren’t so isolated. But with Justin so distant, and Harry lacking any friends his own age, the shallow infatuation took root and grew. Even when Harry found girlfriends and lovers, when he went away and traveled the world -- Bob was first in his heart, there to stay.

Of course it was hopeless. They both knew that. Bob’s soul was imprisoned within the confines of his skull, unable to touch the slightest wisp of true life, to experience the tiniest bit of the world outside except for what the runes allowed. His body was a projection of light and nothing more. Harry pretended Bob’s touch unnerved him when he noticed -- because it did, seeing him disappear up to the elbow or knee within his own body -- but he didn’t actually _feel_ anything.

(One time he tried to get Bob to pass his hand through Harry’s head and opened his eyes inside his arm, and he still doesn’t really understand what he saw.)

So Harry learned to push the longing down, and associate the cool ivory of Bob’s skull with comfort. He knew what symbols he touched by the feel of them against his fingertips, matching them to months of runic study. He liked to curve his palm over Bob’s crown and rub his thumb over the smooth ridges of Bob’s eye sockets, avoiding the sharper crevice of his nose and the unsettling row of his teeth. 

It became a kind of meditation, almost, and a way to convince himself that the person he cared about most in the world was with him, and couldn’t be taken away.

He turned on his side, tucked Bob’s skull a little closer to his stomach, and closed his eyes. His head hurt. Bob hummed softly next to the bed so Harry knew he wasn’t alone.

*

Hrothbert of Bainbridge was not a good man.

A loyal man, certainly. A just man, possibly, if viewed in the right light with a bit of squinting. A foolish man, most definitely, given he fell for a woman so far out of his league he was still paying for it hundreds of years later, and regretted not a single instance of that blazing, scouring love. He murdered for it. Tortured, and sacrificed, and threw aside any instance of pity and moral fibre he might have possessed for one more second of her presence. Even before that he had killed, and lied, and disdained what others might have judged honorable in the pursuit of knowledge.

And after his death... oh, after his death he’d been _malevolent_ , full of a despairing rage that worked ever to bring about his masters’ downfalls. His every waking moment -- and they were all waking, the curse robbing him of any ability for sleep -- was spent plotting and seething, darkening his soul until it was little more than coal. Burnt out and hollow with hatred.

Hrothbert of Bainbridge could never have been saved.

But Bob... it was an innocent name, given by an innocent child. _Bob_ was a flame kindled from that coal, that burned on the breath of one man alone. Harry was his fuel, his air; Harry sparked the flame, and fed it. Harry, a troubled child, but sweet, who grew into a man that Bob... loved.

Again.

He wondered, sometimes, whether it was a good thing he was imprisoned. Harry deserved more than he had: a life lived on the edge of poverty, never knowing if he’d make next month’s rent; relationships full of secrets that smothered him like mourning shrouds; peril, from his chosen profession and the overwatch of that damned High Council full of supercilious hypocrites. If Bob had his magic and his body, he’d have surely tried to kill the lot of them to make Harry’s life just that little bit easier.

Instead he is reduced to a mirage that speaks. Which is not nothing, he admits, given he stops Harry from blowing himself up a truly distressing number of times each month with his accumulated knowledge. And when Harry twists restlessly in his bed, Bob can sometimes soothe him with his voice until those plush lips part in a sigh, and Harry lies quiescent once more.

Lust is a function of the body, but desire is from the mind -- and soul. Bob knows down to the second when he started desiring Harry, his memory eidetic now that it’s not dependent on the frailties of mortal flesh. Early enough that Bob feels guilty; late enough that Harry would be disappointed. In all truth Bob doesn’t know if he’d ever _not_ feel guilty the first time he thought desirously of Harry’s attention, his hands, the vulnerable nape of his neck when he bent over his potions, no matter how old the man was. Bob’s millennia of accumulated sin was heavier than any man ought to bear.

So they watched each other from across an impassable gulf between life and death, and centuries of time, each longing for the other. Each pretending that he did not.

Bob scoffed silently to himself as Harry murmured his name on the bed. Long fingers flexed along the curve of his skull, Harry’s brows briefly furrowing until Bob murmured reassurances in his ear. He settled in to wait out the night.

Tomorrow, after all, was a new day.


End file.
